At the PWC this week: Carson Kreitzer

2015-16 McKnight Fellow in Playwriting Carson Kreitzer is workshopping Capital Crime! at the Playwrights' Center this week with director Leah Cooper, composer Annie Enneking, and actors Jessie Scarborough-Ghent, JC Cutler*, Peter Christian Hansen*, Christian Bardin, Miriam Schwartz, Shawn Hamilton*, Ansa Akyea*, Annie Enneking*, and John Riedlinger* (*Member of Actors' Equity). The public is invited to a free reading (with music!) of this piece on Thursday, June 16 at 2:15 p.m. Learn a bit about Carson in this mini-interview:

What does being the first 3-time McKnight Fellowship in Playwriting mean to you?

Am I the first? I didn’t know that! I am so grateful for this kind of deep, profound support throughout my career. I was very lucky to get a McKnight (at that point, called the McKnight Advancement Grant) early on, back in 2001, which allowed me to put off Graduate School and spend the year traveling to and being in rehearsals for the first three productions of my play SELF DEFENSE, or death of some salesmen, at Perishable Theater in Providence, back home with Frank Theatre at the Playwrights’ Center, and then in New York with New Georges and Reverie Productions, at HERE Arts Centre. That experience of being in three different rehearsal processes was invaluable for my development as a playwright, and something you really can’t learn in Grad School - how to be in the room with other artists, how to arrive at a production together.

The second was after grad school, in 2009, and allowed me to really go deep into my exploration of Lee Miller’s life in Behind the Eye.

And now this year, when I can once again blessedly just focus on the writing, not the keeping a roof over my head part. So this has been three incredible years of support, spanning fourteen years. This has had a tremendous impact on my life as a writer. The middle is long, and the need for support is profound. The McKnight Fellowships have allowed me to pursue work that is not the most commercial, but that is absolutely closest to my heart and spirit. I’ve seen a lot of talk recently about artists being entrepreneurs, and this is certainly true in that we’re out in the universe on our own, freelance, no retirement plan. But I find this idea that we’re all running our own start-up, and if we can’t connect a product to customers who want to pay enough for it then we have failed just incredibly dispiriting. I want to make art that is expensive to put on, not because it is some kind of lavish spectacle, but because actors are expensive, and theater rent is expensive. Being there, all together, live in a room every night… it’s expensive. And I want tickets to be cheap, so that I am not just addressing people with good jobs and the independently wealthy. (Because I am certainly not in that group. There is a lot of theater I can’t afford to see, and this is my chosen profession...) Organizations like the McKnight Foundation make risky, potentially non-economically viable art possible. And that is absolutely my favorite kind of art.

Tell us about Capital Crime!, your Guthrie commission.

This is a play I’ve been wanting to write for a long time, and I’m so excited to be digging in. I call it my income inequality play, but it’s become much more wide-ranging as I write. I am using two intertwining stories, one real, one fictional, to examine a time one hundred years ago that feels very familiar today. The real story is that of Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, and Harry Thaw, our first “Crime of the Century.”

From website for the PBS documentary Murder of the Century:

“In 1906, the murder of Stanford White, New York architect and man-about-town, by Harry Thaw, heir to a Pittsburgh railroad fortune, was reported 'to the ends of the civilized globe'; much of the focus, however, was on Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful showgirl in the center of the love triangle. It was a sensational murder story that had everything: money, power, class, love, rage, lust and revenge.”

What fascinates me about this story is the way everything that is happening today was already present, full-blown, in this original scandal. Our fascination with celebrity, and crime. Our love of re-enactments, and salacious details. The moral hazards of extreme income disparity, and the way tales of sex and crime can distract us from the deep, structural problems. And perhaps most of all, the way we as a society consume young women. With our current media, it is happening faster and faster. We love them, we shower them with attention. We love it when they crack. We get bored and move on to the next. This is where it began. With Evelyn Nesbit.  

Tell us about your experience with the NNPN rolling world premiere of Lasso of Truth.

Oh, it was a wonderful year! We began at the Marin Theatre Company, where Jasson Minidakis, who originally commissioned the play, directed the first production. Next was Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta, where director Rachel May and I had worked together once before, and then finally Unicorn Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri, which was my first time working with director Johnny Wolfe, and my first time in this theater, in fact, in this state! It was a lot of time on the road, but just an amazing experience, working with three different directors, casts, sets of designers, in three profoundly different performance spaces, and with very different audiences, as well. It just teaches you so much about how your play really works. It was an opportunity I had’t had since that year with SELF DEFENSE. Much more often, you get one production of a show, and that’s it. Second and third productions are very hard to come by, and NNPN’s Rolling World Premieres are a wonderful corrective to this. Three productions, with time for re-writes in each process, really feels like the right number to field-test your new play. And I was absolutely delighted to be able to bring it home for the Workhaus Collective production in April, directed by Leah Cooper, at the Playwrights’ Center - bringing it home to the place where it was developed over the course of years! It was exciting to get to see the play truly live in the space where it took its first steps.